Bush makes room for Rice

America’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, is resigning and will be replaced by one of George Bush's closest confidants, Condoleezza Rice. With this, the administration's most famous malcontent is making way for a fierce loyalist

IT IS a safe bet that Colin Powell, America's secretary of state for the past four years, is more popular and respected around the world than his boss. Mr Powell's more emollient, multilateralist style was much more to the liking of America's allies and other interlocutors than the unilateralist, “my way or the highway” style of President George Bush. So those in the world's capitals who groaned when Mr Bush beat John Kerry earlier this month are likely to have heaved a sigh of regret on hearing, on Monday November 15th, that Mr Powell was resigning. The following day, Mr Bush announced that he was giving Mr Powell's job to Condoleezza Rice, currently his national-security adviser and someone more in tune with the president's way of thinking.

Ms Rice first emerged on to the national stage as Mr Bush's foreign-policy tutor during his 2000 run for the presidency. That same year, she published an article in Foreign Affairs criticising what she saw as the sloppy drift of foreign policy under Bill Clinton. Power matters, she wrote, and America should not be ashamed to assert its self-interest. She mocked the idea of foreign policy as social work, famously saying that American troops should not be escorting children to school in Bosnia. As a fluent Russian speaker who had spent years studying Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, she wanted America to return to a foreign policy that paid due attention to the country's relations with great powers like Russia and China.

But September 11th, 2001 changed the way the Bush administration saw the world. The president quickly went on the offensive, first in Afghanistan and then, more controversially, in Iraq. Mr Powell was a voice of caution on the second of these wars, urging Mr Bush to go to the United Nations and to make every effort to build an international coalition. The president took his advice but went to war anyway when it became clear that there was no chance of getting the Security Council to back an invasion. All too often, Mr Powell was outflanked by the more aggressive duo of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and Dick Cheney, the vice-president. Though in public Mr Powell maintained that some of his disagreements with the “hawks” were more perceived than real, his frustration was known to be mounting.

After the September 11th attacks, Ms Rice's role in formulating foreign policy differed from Mr Powell's in a crucial respect. Whereas the secretary of state was locked in tussle after tussle with the likes of Mr Rumsfeld, she was more like Mr Bush's referee. Her close personal relationship with the president allowed her, after heated cabinet debates, to weigh in alone—and often decisively—with her boss.

Once she takes over at the State Department, she will have a bureaucratic power base that she lacked before (though, on the other hand, she will not be as physically close to Mr Bush as she was when she worked out of the White House). With the departure of Mr Powell, the foreign-policy team is more likely to speak with a single voice. And that voice is more likely than ever to sound like Mr Bush's. In a press conference last week, the president reiterated his belief that the spread of democracy is the only way to bring lasting peace and prosperity to the world.

Mr Powell's resignation comes at a particularly difficult time: when American forces are attempting to break the back of the Iraqi insurgency through a bloody battle to recapture the rebel-held town of Fallujah; and when the death of Yasser Arafat is offering a chance of restarting the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process (see article). Mr Powell's staff say he will continue working at full speed until his successor takes over—he is due to attend talks in the West Bank next week. But it may be hard for him to make any progress while every political leader to whom he speaks is wondering whether what he says will still hold once Ms Rice takes over.

Mr Bush had already signalled the consolidation of his cabinet with more like-minded figures last week when he replaced John Ashcroft, his hardline attorney-general, with an equally controversial figure, Alberto Gonzales. Mr Gonzales is a long-time loyalist who served Mr Bush as legal counsel when he was governor of Texas, and was later brought to do the same job at the White House. In 2002, Mr Gonzales wrote a memo for his boss supporting the notion that the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan were irregular “enemy combatants” not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The new paradigm of the war on terrorism, he wrote, “renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners”. This was seen by critics as a wink at the torture of captives for information. Once again, Mr Powell fought against this policy, and lost.

The most important remaining figure from the first Bush administration whose future seems in doubt is Mr Rumsfeld. Given that Ms Rice was said to have coveted his job running the world's largest military machine, her move to the State Department may mean that Mr Rumsfeld is staying, at least for the time being.

Many (including The Economist) had called on the defence secretary to resign or be sacked after the prison-abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But Mr Bush held on to him. This is partly because the administration is not terribly good at admitting to mistakes. But it may also be because Mr Rumsfeld is halfway through a transformation of America's military, from a lumbering force of infantry and armoured divisions built to face the Soviets into a lighter, faster, supposedly smarter, technology-driven machine for the wars of tomorrow. Such a transformation has its opponents, and Mr Bush may conclude that the hard-charging Mr Rumsfeld needs to be kept on board to see it through, no matter whom this upsets. A second Bush administration with Mr Rumsfeld but without Mr Powell is bound to cause dismay in many parts of the world.